Labyrinth
A Novel
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Notable International Crime Novel of the Year – Crime Reads / Lit Hub
From a prize-winning Turkish novelist, a heady, political tale of one man’s search for identity and meaning in Istanbul after the loss of his memory.
A blues singer, Boratin, attempts suicide by jumping off the Bosphorus Bridge, but opens his eyes in the hospital. He has lost his memory, and can't recall why he wished to end his life. He remembers only things that are unrelated to himself, but confuses their timing. He knows that the Ottoman Empire fell, and that the last sultan died, but has no idea when. His mind falters when remembering civilizations, while life, like a labyrinth, leads him down different paths.
From the confusion of his social and individual memory, he is faced with two questions. Does physical recognition provide a sense of identity? Which is more liberating for a man, or a society: knowing the past, or forgetting it?
Embroidered with Borgesian micro-stories, Labyrinth flows smoothly on the surface while traversing sharp bends beneath the current.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
S nmez's latest, following Istanbul, Istanbul, is a cerebral philosophical meditation on memory and what it means to live without it. Boratin Bey is a 28-year-old blues singer living in Istanbul, or at least that is what he has been told. After jumping from the Bosphorus Bridge in an apparent suicide attempt, the musician has experienced complete amnesia: "He raises his eyes and looks at his face. The face he met a week ago. It's that new. Hello stranger, he says." His friend and bandmate Bek helps him relearn who he is, or was, answering basic questions such as "what sort of person was I, what did I look like?" Boratin wanders unfamiliar streets, kisses a woman he is told he knows, and attends the funeral of someone who he is told was a friend, Zafir who, as Boratin describes it, "got left behind in the past and disappeared there." Indeed, the central question of the novel is if the loss of one's past is a loss of selfhood or a liberation. As another patient says to him, "Maybe you are unfortunate to still be alive and fortunate to have lost your memory." Both poetic and an existential novel of ideas, S nmez's prose, in Hussein's translation, is accessible and profound, bringing to mind Albert Camus and Patrick Modiano. While Boratin must learn to find fulfilment with "a blank memory," this is a book that will undoubtedly linger in a reader's mind.
